What We’re Reading: Monday, September 17, 2012

After a too-short weekend (aren’t they all?), the team at 435 Digital is back at it and ready to rock the work week. Here’s a quick look at what we’re reading this Monday Morning:

As usual, we’re busy keeping tabs on the always-evolving world of SEO. If you could do only three things to optimize your site, what would they be? What should they be?

If you could do only three things for SEO, what would they be? This is a question encountered by many smaller businesses, and even somewhat larger companies, either due to not having enough people (time) and/or dollars available to invest in a big way.

If this is a scenario you’re facing, what follows are three minimal SEO tasks you must do.

Step 1: Check Your Indexing Status

The first step is to make sure that your site is getting found! The best way to do this is to check your indexing status in Google Webmaster Tools and see how many of your pages are indexed by Google. Once you’re logged in, click on “Health” and then “Index status” in the menu on the left.

If you work in digital marketing, your office may be bursting at the seems with millenials. You probably interact with them on a daily basis. But marketing to them? That’s another story. How do you make your brand stand out to a generation that has grown up bombarded with digital ads? iMedia connection has some ideas:

Millennials entered their adult lives during the deepest recession in American history since the Great Depression. Due to high unemployment and underemployment rates and modest household income levels, many are struggling to make ends meet. In fact, 32 percent of Millennial shoppers are having difficulty affording weekly groceries, compared to 22 percent of the general population. SymphonyIRI’s Shopper Sentiment Index revealed this generation’s low level of financial confidence during the past 18 months, charting a more negative and volatile sentiment compared to other age groups.

Simply put, Millennials are strapped for cash and especially price driven. They’ve adopted frugal shopping behaviors to keep their budgets in check. Millennials are deal-seekers and coupon-clippers, and are more likely to give up their favorite brands to save.

The twins have sunk $1 million into SumZero, a social network created by Divya Narendra in 2008, according to The Wall Street Journal. Nardenda allied with the Winklevosses in their fight against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the claim that he stole the trio’s idea, which eventually became Facebook. The battle, dramatized in the movie The Social Network, resulted in a $65 million settlement for the Winklevosses, though they have unsuccessfully sought further damages.

SumZero describes itself as “the largest online community for hedge fund, mutual fund and private equity professionals,” and has users from funds including Greenlight, Pershing Square and Weiss Asset Management. The site caters to employees on the “buy side” from mutual funds, hedge funds and private-equity firms. The site bars those from the “sell side” such as Wall Street banks.

Fake fans, fake “likes” and fake reviews are some of the worst aspects of social media — or at least for those of us earnest enough to take user-generated content and the will of the crowd seriously. Now, new research from Gartner lays bare the fact that it’s only going to get worse, as paid social media interactions become a more established industry unto themselves. The analysts predict that by 2014, some 10%-15% ofall social media reviews and other forms of engagement will be fake, paid for by the companies getting endorsed.

Ed Thompson, Gartner analyst and co-author of the report, says that this compares to about 1%-4% of social media interactions being paid today — a number he says is based on research on paid and automatically generated reviews and other interactions for different brands.